MacArthur Fellows 2010

October 5, 2010

The MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grants" for 2010 were just announced,[1-2] and there were quite a few scientists represented, most of whom were from the universities at which you would expect such things. Actually, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, well known to public television fans for their largess, would prefer that people didn't call these "Genius Grants." Their preferred phrase refers to the recipients as "MacArthur Fellows."

In any case, this is a big thing. Each fellow gets an unrestricted grant of half a million dollars. An artist getting such a payout is free to pursue her art, but what does a practicing scientist do with the monetary equivalent of a Nobel Prize? A tenured professor could take a year's sabbatical to write a book, with enough money left over to buy copies for all his friends.

I wrote about the 2008 MacArthur Fellows in a previous article (Genius Grants, September 25, 2008). In that article I listed alphabetically some familiar past recipients of these fellowships:

For those of you who think women are underrepresented in science, this list has four men and five women.

Who is considered a genius today? The British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, published a list of living geniuses in 2007.[3] The list was developed from a multitude of nominations, and the nominees were scored by a panel of "creativity and innovation" experts against criteria such as intellectual power and cultural importance. Here are the top eleven names from that list. I went one more than ten to include Grigori Perelman, whom I wrote about in a previous article (Grigori Perelman, July 6, 2010).

If we consider all historical geniuses, Albert Einstein is the first person usually called to mind. I'm somewhat partial to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein wrote about the philosophy of science. His writing was sparse, in the form of "sound bites," long before these had run rampant in the media. An example is the following from his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: